Libertarian Economic Logic (chart attached)

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 03:55:12PM +1000, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:
> On 2019-09-19 06:54, Razer wrote:
> > Exactly. Workers don't need the boss. The boss needs them
> 
> Do you know how to make a pencil?
> 
> Could you make a pencil without the boss providing the tools, the materials,
> and the direction on how to use those tools and materials.
> 
> Let us see your pencil.


There's a problem with this boss vs workers dialectic - it's a bit of
a straw man.

There are axes of competency - IQ, creativity, physical adroitness,
physical strength, physical stamina, mental stamina (the ability to
maintain focus on one concept/problem for an extended duration),
empathy (actually measurable, quite extensively measured and studied,
and one of the highest factors in a child correlating to IQ in later
life, with IQ being a primary determinant of most else), etc.

The boss/worker dichotomy is problematically restrictive to a useful
conversation.

The free libre and open source software movement has demonstrated
definitively in this world a relative abundance of mentally competent
humans willing (food, clothing and housing assumed) to dedicate
inordinate hours to the creation and improvement of FLOSS software,
to be made freely available for any and all.

The boss/worker dichotomy appears to have something of a poverty
consciousness element to it, as though we have a paucity of "bosses"
and/or a paucity of humans willing to invent, construct and/ or
operate machinery to create things that other humans want.

As we well know, the radio was going to be the end of concerts, the
TV was going to be the end of cinema, telephone the end of writing
letters, cassette tapes the end of the music industry, CDs the end of
the music industry, DVDs the end of the movie industry, and the
Internet the end of all global production of entertainment. The end
of the world is so just around the corner, always.


Now, I neither know how to make a pencil, nor am particularly
inclined to learn, though I am a bit of an information junkie and
would gladly download and store forever, instructions for making
pencils, and further instructions for making the machines that make
pencils, and those for the machines to make the machines etc.

Photocopying was going to be the end of books, yet we have more
books, music, movies and other "creative products" produced on a
yearly basis than the entire world used to see in a decade.

And the internet is the abundance of the duplication of information,
for the marginal cost of the electricity to do so. This is fantastic!

The next step after 1) photocopiers, 2) the internet for information
copying, is 3) molecular copies, where you simply pour in your
molecular 'toner', plug in your USB design files and press the big
green PRINT button.

We are seeing more and more abundance, and more and more time
available for creative pursuits rather than picking cotton or oiling
the loom.


A possible misnomer here is merely that once a sufficiently motivated
individual (or group) creates the first of something, be it a car,
radio, or 3D printer, dozens of other folks have this odd tendency to
pick up the idea and run with it.

And certain folk equally rapidly try to lock it all down with
completely artificial and suppressive constructs such as patents and
copy"rights".

Richard Stallman (RMS) attempted with the GPL (Gnu General Public
License) to hack the existing copyright statute laws to "reduce the
'rights' claimed around copyright law to the minimum necessary to
maximally engender promulgation of more free software".

Many argue over the details, but the results of the GPL speak for
themselves (notwithstanding grumblings from the *BSDs and the
impetulant Android exercise).


The genie of FLOSS cannot be put back in the bottle of "patents and
exclusively proprietary software".

The genies of the radio, tv, photocopier, internet, 3d printers, and
in the future molecular copiers (the "Star Trek economy"), are out of
the bottle.

Sufficiently motivated folks WILL build each of these things from
first principles.

And we need no bosses to do so.

And then we will give away the results, and the world shall
experience increasing layers of abundance in all areas.

This is in the nature of some humans.